As of this past Monday, September 30, the St. George’s upper schoolers may have noticed that the room across from the senior dining room has had signs fill the center of its doors.
Formally known as the upper school lounge but commonly referred to by students as the junior lounge, the space has recently been closed and is set to open today. Its well known student title “the junior lounge” is because of its history of being mostly occupied by the junior class each year due to their independent study privileges.
The only rule for being in this lounge was broken.
Assistant Campus Director Ms. Leanne Ricketson spoke about this one rule.
“It’s really the junior class’s responsibility to follow the one rule. And the one rule is no food or drink other than water,” Ms. Ricketson explained.
Junior Caroline Cochran was a student affected by the senior lounge closing.
“It got shut down because people were leaving trash and not cleaning up after themselves, and they’re finding food and drinks in there,” Cochran explained.
While this might sound like a simple break of the rules, Ms. Ricketson describes how the rule was broken in a way that could not be ignored, with Executive Assistant to the Head of School and to the Board of Trustees Mrs. Sharon Lathum feeling compelled to clean up their trash.
“Mrs. Lathum started having to clean up the lounge after the juniors in the afternoons or in the mornings, and she was finding things like whole sandwich wrappers or the entire plastic thing that holds the peanut butter and jelly from Flik or cups full of ice, leaving water rings on tables,” Ms. Ricketson detailed.
This was an issue that administration could not ignore as leaving their messes might mean an issue with rodents as our campus is located around woods.
Some students have asked the question: why can seniors eat in the senior lounge and students cannot eat in the upper school lounge?
To this, Ms. Ricketson responded, “The junior lounge is far and away nicer than the senior dining room… The senior dining room was created as an extension of the true dining room. So it’s dining hall tables. It’s the same carpet that’s in the dining hall. The junior lounge has that gorgeous conference table, and that’s the space that we use to entertain.”
Ms. Ricketson went on to compare the St. George’s Collierville Campus as a house.
“If you think of the school as a house, that’s our fanciest room, and what’s cool about us is we let the kids in the fanciest room, but we also expect them to take care of it,” Ms. Ricketson said.
The students not taking care of it was an issue. When this issue was first recognized, the lounge wasn’t immediately closed.
“[Faculty] gave a few reminders. Ms. Malott sent out a Canvas blast or two, and we saw absolutely no improvement,” Ms. Ricketson said.
Thus, this wasn’t a conclusion that was jumped to, but it was the conclusion that Ms. Ricketson hoped not to need to act on.
“There’s no fun in closing the lounge. It’s actually really inconvenient because then we have juniors everywhere in spaces that are sometimes used for other things,” Ms. Ricketson said.
Despite inconvenience, Ms. Ricketson made the decision to close the lounge to fix the issue of messes and broken rules. She left it up to the juniors to show progress and a plan to bring back their beloved lounge.
The juniors at first didn’t know what to do. It was left closed for 2 days, so Ms. Ricketson suggested a plan to a group of juniors: making a SignUp Genius or assigning three juniors each period to make sure the space is clean or clean up at the end of their independent study period.
On Wednesday, October 2, group of students began coming up with their own idea at lunch and brought it to their United States History class with Dr. Marianne Leung: a pledge.
Dr. Leung believed that something should be added to their plan.
“I said, ‘Well, maybe you need to have a plan, like maybe different people who sign up, volunteer to just do a double check at the end of the day,’” Dr. Leung recounted.
This plan was very similar to Ms. Ricketson’s suggested plan and seemed to guarantee cleanliness in the lounge. However, the students took initiative and went on with their own plan.
Junior Lucy Dunavant was one of these students.
“Ms. Ricketson told us that we had to come up and do something about it. We weren’t just going to be able to get it back, so we kind of just came up with it with our own ideas,” Dunavant said.
This was the instance of student leadership that the junior class needed to earn back their lounge. This leadership by the junior class was initiated by the closing of the junior lounge and the requirement of student action for the lounge to be opened again.
This was part of the goal for Ms. Ricketson: to have students problem solve and find open dialogue about what they needed to do to earn their space back. Despite it not being her plan, her reaction to the pledge was positive.
“I really thought it was creative,” Ms. Ricketson said.
St. George’s is known to value student-centeredness and, to Ms. Ricketson, this situation is a perfect example of how our school acts student-centered as it focuses on character education learning.
“It is teaching personal accountability. . . I think ‘student centered’ means through every decision you’re thinking about how this benefits the student, even if they have to experience discomfort for a minute while they’re learning and approaching that benefit,” Ms. Ricketson said.
These student leaders rolled out their plan as a pledge to follow the rules of the space.
“You had to pledge your name to make sure you wouldn’t break any of the rules, and the rules were no food in there and no drinks and just to clean up after yourself,” Dunavant said.
As of Friday, October 4, the pledge had been signed by at least 80% of the Class of 2026, and because of that, they have earned their lounge back as of today, Monday, October 7.
However, this plan relies on the students’ accountability and honesty, and rallying for people to sign the pledge leads to people signing it that don’t really think about it.
After just signing the pledge, Junior Hudson Burns explained why he did so.
“A big group of people said, ‘Hudson, have you signed it?’ I said, ‘No.’ [They said], ‘Go ahead, sign it.’ They handed me a pen. . . then I wrote my name on the paper,” Burns explained.
Burns went on to explain his connection to the lounge.
“I don’t really use that room, but they told me to sign it, so I did,” Burns said.
Because Burns does not use that room, he may not eat or drink anything in the space, but others like him who sign it quickly because they were asked to may continue to break these rules.
The junior class seems to believe that at least part of the signatures are not taking the pledge with earnestness. Junior Jackson Bush was one of these students.
“I think a lot of people mean well. . . They’re going to keep their word. I think some people are just signing it to sign it because they want the junior lounge back,” Bush said.
Junior representative Sam Miraglia agreed with him.
“I know some just wanted the space back, but I think the majority of our people have intentions to keep it up,” Miraglia said.
Junior and Legislative Vice President Jackson Juckett added that the success of the pledge is to be determined.
“I think it’s about 50-50, but one thing I do think is that they’re not going to know if we can take care of it if they don’t open it back up,” Juckett said.
Time will tell if this pledge’s signatures will prove authentic as the student body sees what happens in the coming weeks. Ms. Ricketson is aware of that chance.
“We may find two weeks from now that those pledges weren’t really authentic pledges, but it means we tried something, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something different,” Ms. Ricketson stated.
The class of 2025 succeeded in the junior lounge never closing last year, but the class of 2026 is much bigger and therefore is expected to have some level of issues.
“If our smaller senior class didn’t get it closed a single time, but our giant junior class only got it closed once, that feels like the same level of accomplishment,” Ms. Ricketson said.
So the junior class of 2026 is left with a challenge ahead of them.
“Will all those people who signed actually follow that pledge? Hopefully they will,” Dr. Leung stated.